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>> Saturday, April 10, 2010

As any long time readers of my blog may know, I love food. I especially love being able to mix food with science... hence my affinity for all things Alton Brown. Imagine the giddy feeling I got when I stumbled across the PB&J Campaign.

The PB&J campaign is an online effort to educate consumers and promote plant-based meals like the beloved peanut butter and jelly sandwich. While I am not vegetarian, plant-based meals do make up a large portion of my eating habits. Having a PB&J instead of a burger, for example, can save up to 3.5 pounds of carbon dioxide and save approximately 280 gallons of water. That is not even mentioning the land saved.

Cutting back on meat from an environmental standpoint is not a new concept. This extends to fish and poultry as well. Many fish people consume are caught or farmed in less than savory ways. Because of this, I am a HUGE proponent of Seafood Watch. I carry the cards and have the site saved on my phone for quick referencing when at the store or out to eat. Beef, however, is a little more tricky and harder to come by in a sustainable way. In fact, in 2006, the UN declared cattle farming as the number one contributor to climate change. Cattle rearing is also a factor in water quality degradation. To quote the article:

The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other things to water pollution from animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray feed crops.

On a lighter note, though... just by changing a few meals a week to plant and veggie based can make an impact. PB&J is a great start to that. According to the PB&J Campaign website:

If you have a PB&J instead of a red-meat lunch like a ham sandwich or a hamburger, you shrink your carbon footprint by almost 3.5 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions.

So go out and save the earth one peanut butter and jelly sandwich at a time!